PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The influence of Coleridge is traceable throughout Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry”〖H. C., xxvii, 329ff.〗 (1821). Shelley rides into the lists with as high a heart as Sidney, to repel the attack, not of the “moralists” but of the utilitarians. He is not conscious, like Sidney, Dryden, and Arnold, of the history of criticism. He has steeped himself, it is true, in Plato, but he writes with the enthusiasm of a new and personal vision. Poetry, to him, is primarily the expression of the imagination: “it redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man”; “it is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds”; “a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth”; poetry “acts in a divine but unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness”; “a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” Though the student of poetical theory can easily claim that such sentences as these are post-Coleridgean, they are really timeless, like the glorious spirit of Shelley itself.